I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you — Nobody — too?

My dear colleagues, fellow writers and readers and spiritual seekers and satirists, the Rev Dr Sparky is having an identity crisis.

When a reader recently asked me straight up who I was, it took me aback, though not unpleasantly. I deflected his inquiry with the first lines of an Emily Dickinson poem, which worked for the time being. But then I was troubled that perhaps I have not been fair to my kind readers by using such an obvious pseudonym instead of my “real” name.

On reflection, though, I’ve realized that although Rev Dr Sparky is not the name that’s on my mortgage or my credit card bill, it is my real name. So I stole Emily Dickinson’s poem for the title of this little essay, in which I will explain.

My writing name is more my real name than my real name.

I am “the Rev” because I am realio trulio ordained in a progressive mainline Protestant denomination, with a master’s degree in divinity and everything. (Although I could have saved a pile of money just getting ordained online, and probably done just as much good. Damned student loans. But I’m over it.)

And I’m legitimately “Dr” because I have a PhD, which we all know stands for useless knowledge “Piled Higher and Deeper.” I am a student of literary studies, and I modestly believe I have one of the finest minds of the nineteenth century.

(Deep down, I know you shouldn’t really call yourself “Doctor” unless you can do an emergency tracheotomy with a ballpoint pen. But I need the credibility, so I’m using “Dr” anyway, and I just hope I’m never in that situation.)

And Sparky is a name I claimed long ago in real life, because the lyrics to “Total Eclipse of the Heart” illustrate melodramatically but perfectly how a hyperactive, non-neurotypical (as we call it now) like me truly is “living in a powder keg and giving off sparks.”

In other words, my writing name reveals more of my genuine self to you than my given name ever would, just as my writing itself reveals who I am, who I am becoming, and who I wish to become.

And, even more important, I write to to you, the person you are becoming and wish to become.

You’re nobody till somebody reads you?

I never imagined I would “blog.” I truly dislike even the words “blog” and “blogging.” I am appalled and amused that writers, of all people, would acquiesce to using a lumpen, leaden term like “blogging” to describe a literary activity of any kind.

Still, I choose to do it, because I don’t have the time or connections needed to find a literary agent, and because it is an accessible way to bring my words out of the dark and into the light of your eyes today.

Would Emily Dickinson ever have written a blog? What would her first blog post be like? Perhaps this:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you — Nobody — too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

Don’t tell! They’d advertise!

If Ms. Dickinson were blogging today, the “pair of us,” dear reader, would represent only two of nearly 31 million bloggers estimated to be active in the United States by 2020.

And God bless the reclusive Emily Dickinson, fearful of being visible at all, who might go on to say:

How dreary — to be — Somebody!

How public — like a Frog —

To tell one’s name — the livelong June —

To an admiring Bog!

So… “bog” / “blog” — same thing, perhaps, in Ms. Dickinson’s estimation. She clearly knew what must happen when you chose to be Somebody, even in the nineteenth century. Even then, you had to be croaking your name, over and over, and to her it was as distasteful as the frogs the neighbors could hear all night.

Probably few of us have experienced the actual frog chorus, since they have drained all the frog bogs and invented air conditioning. But we know what the analogy means. We call it branding; finding a following; cross-platform marketing or whatever. It takes up a great deal of precious time. But we are told we must do it if we want our voices to be heard among the millions of other voices everywhere. If we want to be Somebody.

Who are you?

I am certainly no expert on branding or any of those other tricks of the trade, but as a former actor, I know something about creating an exterior image or identity.

I write to explore the deeper layers of our identities, where we interact and intersect with literature, with the arts, with philosophy, with other people, and ultimately with the divine. In those liminal encounters, we learn who we are.

For example, when I am struck by the vastness of the universe, the Ultimate that I call G*D, I sense portals of goodness there, through which we can grope our way during our lives. That’s about all I know for sure, but it’s enough to keep me searching for the best ways to live this human life. Are you also someone who senses and seeks this goodness?

Likewise, I find glimpses of this truth in words, in music and art, in all the ways human beings express their love and joy at being alive. Are you also someone who seeks this truth?

And, ultimately, in addition to dealing with the powderkeg of my own unruly brain, I know we are living in a powderkeg of a world. Goodness is resilient but still vulnerable to destruction by the unholy, the uncaring, the forces of chaos and corruption — forces that used to be called evil before we got all prissy about it. Are you also someone who recognizes evil when you see it?

When I gave the Rev Dr Sparky a name, I gave birth to the identity I had longed for all my life. This is now the person I have wanted to be, writing all the things I have wanted to say, to all the people I have always wanted to know.

So I love to see your profiles, and I want to ask you, with Emily Dickinson, who are you? Are you Nobody too? Beyond your labels, beyond your branding, beyond your personas — who are you? We find each other in spaces like these.

The Rev Dr Sparky doesn’t do any other media but this. I write on this platform, and I have some ideas for some book-length projects or essay collections later, but that’s it.

At this stage of my life, I have no time for anything but telling the truth. (What “stage” is that? Well, I think of myself as middle aged because I expect to live to be about 120 years old. Satisfied?)

And for me, the truth is that all this is a holy, loving, cosmic comedy. We are all stumbling around in it; I don’t care how enlightened we’ve become. I like to show how fallible humans are, starting humbly with myself and all the places I fall short.

But no need to comfort me in the comments, because I’m generally talking about you, too, dear. Nobody rides this train without getting their ticket punched.

I used to be Somebody. Thank goodness I got over that.

It seems to me that the importance of identity ebbs and flows throughout a lifetime. At times, we interrogate our own identity mercilessly, looking for evidence that we are someone unique and special. We want to know who we are and, more importantly, who we are not.

I call this stage the Popeye phase of identity development:

“I yam what I yam, and that’s all that I yam.”

Believe me, I did my share of that intense self-scrutiny, in a closet full of volumes I’ll probably burn for the heat if we end up with nuclear winter instead of catastrophic global warming.

Thankfully, as time has gone by, I have become more comfortable with an expanding identify that resonates with a fluid universe.

Even as a young man, Walt Whitman saw his identity as one of addition, not definition:

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself;

I am large, I contain multitudes.

I write from life experiences that have included illness and madness and inspiration; the complicated matrix of love that is family; work and achievement; self-delusion and failure; transcendent efforts and venal selfishness; study and seeking; and my ongoing observations of the absurd and just plain moronic behavior of our fellow human spirits, all self-important in their little meat suits; and no one has to believe I’m special, because I’m not.

Sure, I am unique. But I am not special.

And I’m delighted with that.

I suppose my identity crisis has been averted. I am not some Somebody who goes by the name the bank uses, the name they always mispronounce in the doctor’s office. (Always.)

And neither are you. You are whomever you allow yourself to be; the Nobody without artificial limitation; the person you write or create or enact yourself into existence.

And I remain the Rev Dr Sparky, the Nobody who makes caustic comments on the mishaps, miracles, tricks, tragedies, absurdities, and genuine glorious grace of this precious, awful, mysterious life.

I am the Rev Dr Sparky, happy to be Nobody.

And very happy to meet you.